The Sorceress (21 page)

“I am Dr. John Dee,” he said, handing the man his small overnight bag but holding on to his laptop bag. “Yes, sir, I recognized you. Follow me, please.” Dee thought he could hear a trace of the Middle East in the man’s accent; he was almost positive it was Egyptian. He followed the man to an anonymous black limousine parked directly outside arrivals in the no-parking zone. The driver pulled open the rear door and stepped back, and in that instant, Dee’s nostrils caught a familiar scent and he abruptly realized that this car and driver had not come from his
company. For a heartbeat he thought about turning and running … but then he realized he had nowhere to go. “Thank you,” he said politely, sliding into the darkened interior. The door shut with a soft pneumatic click. The odor in the enclosed compartment was enough to take his breath away. He sat quietly and heard the thump when his suitcase was put into the trunk; moments later, the car pulled smoothly and silently away from the curb.

The Magician put his laptop bag beside him, then turned to look at the hooded figure he knew would be sitting at the other end of the leather seat. Forcing a smile to his face, he bowed slightly. “Madam, I must say I am surprised—and delighted, of course—to see you here.”

The shape in the gloom moved and cloth rustled. Then the interior light clicked on, and Dee, though he had been alerted by the smell to what he was going to see, started at the terrifying sight of the huge lioness’s head inches from his own. The light gleamed off vicious-looking incisors and glistened off thick whiskers. The Dark Elder Bastet raised her head and glared at him with her huge yellow slit-pupiled eyes. “I am really beginning to dislike you, Dr. John Dee,” she growled.

The doctor forced himself to smile, then lowered his gaze from the sharp teeth and brushed an invisible speck of dust off his sleeve. “You are in the majority, then; a lot of people dislike me. But fair is fair,” he added lightly, “I dislike a lot of people. In fact, most people. But, believe me, madam, I have nothing but your best interests at heart.”

The light clicked off and Bastet became invisible in the gloom.

A thought struck Dee and he asked, “I thought your aversion to iron prevented you from using modern conveniences like cars.”

“Iron is not toxic to me, unlike some of the other Elders. I can tolerate it for short periods of time. And much of this vehicle is carbon fiber.”

Dee nodded gravely, filing away the information that iron was not toxic to all Elders. He’d always assumed that it was the coming of iron that had driven the Elders out of this world. After more than four hundred years in their service, there was still so much he did not know about them.

The car slowed, then stopped. Through the dark tinted window Dee could just about make out the glowing red traffic light. He waited until the light changed to green before trusting himself to speak again. “Can I ask what I have done to anger you?” he murmured, pleased that he’d managed to keep his voice from trembling. Bastet was a First Generation Elder and one of the original rulers of Danu Talis. After the sinking of the island, she had been worshipped for generations in Egypt, and countries and peoples from the Incas to the Chinese honored cats in memory of the time she had walked the ancient humani world.

Dee heard paper rustle and pages turn and he realized that the Elder was reading in complete darkness.

“You are trouble incarnate, Dr. Dee. I can smell it coming
off you like that ridiculous sulfur aura you prefer.” There was the sound of paper being slowly and methodically shredded. “I have perused your file. It does not make for inspiring reading. You may be our premier agent in this world, but I would argue you have been particularly useless. You have failed again and again in your mission to capture the Flamels, and have left a trail of death and destruction in your wake. You are tasked with protecting the Elders’ existence, and yet three days ago you destroyed not just one but three interlinked Shadowrealms. This latest adventure in Paris has come close—dangerously close—to revealing our presence to the humani. You even permitted the Nidhogg to rampage through the streets.”

“Well, that really was Machiavelli’s idea …,” the Magician began.

“Many Elders have called for your destruction,” Bastet continued in a deep growl.

The sentence shocked Dee into silence. “But I serve the Dark Elders loyally. I have done so for centuries,” he argued plaintively.

“Your methods are crude, antiquated,” the cat-headed Elder went on. “Consider Machiavelli: he is a scalpel, neat and precise; you are a broadsword, crude and blundering. You once almost burned this very city to the ground. Your creatures killed a million humani in Ireland. One hundred and thirty thousand died in Tokyo. And despite this loss of humani life, you still failed to secure the Flamels.”

“I was told to capture the Flamels and the Codex by any
means possible. That was the priority,” Dee snapped, anger making him reckless. “I did what I had to do to achieve that goal. And three days ago, let me remind you, I delivered the Book of Abraham the Mage.”

“But even there you failed,” Bastet whispered coldly. “The Codex was incomplete, lacking the final two pages.” The Elder’s breathing changed and Dee was suddenly aware in the darkness that her meat-tainted breath was dangerously close to his face. “Magician, you enjoy the protection of a powerful Elder—perhaps the most powerful of us all—and that has kept you alive thus far,” Bastet pressed on. Huge glowing yellow eyes appeared out of the gloom, the pupils as narrow as knife blades. “When others called for your punishment or death, your master has protected you. But I wonder—and I am not alone in this—why does an Elder use such a flawed tool?”

The words chilled him. “What did you call me?” he finally managed to whisper. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt huge in his mouth.

Bastet’s eyes blazed. “A flawed tool.”

Dee felt breathless. He tried to calm his thundering heart. It had been more than four hundred years since he’d last heard those three words, but they’d remained vividly etched in his memory. He’d never forgotten them. In many ways they had shaped his life.

Turning his face away from the stink of Bastet’s breath, Dee rested his forehead against the cool glass and looked out into the night flashing past in streaks of light. He was driving
through the heart of twenty-first-century London, and yet when he closed his eyes and remembered the last time he had felt this way, the last time he had heard those words, he felt as if he were back in the city of Henry VIII.

Memories, long buried but never forgotten, came flooding back, and he knew the Elder’s use of those three bitter words could not have been accidental. She was letting him know just how much she knew about him.

It was April 23, 1542, a cold showery day in London, and John Dee was standing before his father, Roland, in their house on Thames Street. Dee was fifteen years old—and looked older than his years—but at that moment he felt like a ten-year-old. He had locked his hands into fists behind his back and was unable to move, afraid to speak, breathless, heart thundering so hard it was actually shaking his entire body. He knew if he moved he would fall over, or turn and run like a child from the room, and if he spoke he would break down and weep. But he would not show any weakness in front of Roland Dee. Over his father’s right shoulder, through the tiny diamond-paned window, John could see the top of the nearby Tower of London. Standing still and silent, he allowed his father to continue reading.

John Dee had always known he was different.

He was an only child, and it had been obvious from an early age that he was gifted with an extraordinary ability for mathematics and languages; he could read and write not only English, but also Latin and Greek, and had taught himself French and a little German. John was entirely devoted to
his mother, Jane, and she always sided with him against his domineering father. Encouraged by his mother, John had set his sights on attending St. John’s College, Cambridge. He had thought—had hoped—that his father would be delighted, but Roland Dee was a textile merchant who held a minor position in Henry’s court and was almost fearful of too much education. Roland had seen what happened to educated men at court: it was too easy to upset the king, and men who did that too often ended up in prison or dead, stripped of their lands and fortune. John knew his father wanted him to take over the family business, and for that he needed no further education than the abilities to read and write and add up a column of figures.

But John Dee wanted more.

On that April day in 1542, he had finally plucked up the courage to tell his father he was attending college, with or without his permission. His grandfather, William Wild, had agreed to pay the fees, and Dee had enrolled without his father’s knowledge.

“And if you go to this school, what then?” Roland demanded, bushy beard bristling with rage. “They will fill your head with useless nonsense. You will learn your Latin and Greek, your mathematics and philosophy, your history and geography, but what use is that to me, or to you? You will not be content with that. You will seek more knowledge, and that will send you down some dark paths, my boy. You will never be satisfied, because you will never know enough.”

“Say what you will,” the fifteen-year-old boy had managed to answer. “I am going.”

“Then you will become like a knife that is sharpened so often it becomes blunt: you will become a flawed tool … and what use have I for a flawed tool?”

Dr. John Dee opened his eyes and focused once more on the streets of modern London.

He had rarely spoken to his father after that day, even when the old man was locked up in the Tower of London. Dee had gone to Chelmsford, and then to the newly founded Trinity College, and quickly established a reputation for himself as one of the most brilliant men of his age. And there were times when he remembered his father’s words and realized that Roland Dee had been right: his quest for knowledge was insatiable, and it had taken him down some very dark and dangerous paths. It had ultimately led him to the Dark Elders.

And somewhere at the back of his mind, in that dark and secret place where only the most hurtful memories are buried, lurked those three bitter words.

A flawed tool.

No matter what he achieved—his extraordinary successes, his amazing discoveries and uncannily accurate predictions, even his immortality and his association with figures who had been worshipped by generations as gods and myths—those three words mocked him, because he was secretly afraid that his father had been correct about that too. Perhaps he
was a
flawed tool.

Clearing his throat, he lifted his forehead from the
window, fixed a quizzical smile on his face and turned back to the dark interior of the car. “I was not aware that you had a file on me.”

Leather squeaked as Bastet changed position. “We have files on every immortal and mortal humani who is in our service. Yours happens to be bigger than all the rest combined.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. It is, as I have said, a litany of failures.”

“I am disappointed that you should view it that way,” Dee said softly. “Luckily, I do not answer to you. I answer to a higher authority,” he added, with the smile still fixed on his face.

Bastet hissed like a cat with its tail caught.

“But enough of these pleasantries,” the Magician continued, rubbing his hands quickly together. “What brings you to London? I thought you had returned to your Bel Air mansion after our adventure in Mill Valley.”

“Earlier today I was contacted by someone from my past.” The Dark Elder’s voice was a low angry rumbling. “Someone I thought long dead, someone I never wanted to talk to again.”

“I’m not sure what this has to do with me …,” the Magician began.

“Mars Ultor made contact with me.”

Dee straightened. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he could just about make out Bastet’s cat head silhouetted in black against the lighter rectangle of the window. “Mars spoke to you?”

“For the first time in centuries. And he asked me to help you.”

Dee nodded. When he had left the catacombs earlier, the Elder had still not responded to his offer to bring the twins back to Paris and force Sophie to lift the curse.

Cloth rustled and the cat smell of the Goddess grew stronger. “Is it true?” she asked, close enough to make Dee recoil from her foul breath.

The Magician turned away, blinking tears from his eyes. “Is …” He coughed. “Is what true?”

“Can you release him? The Witch cursed him; that is a curse she will not lift.”

One of the reasons the English Magician had survived in the lethal court of Queen Elizabeth and for centuries afterward was that he never made a promise he could not keep, or a threat he didn’t intend to carry out. He took a moment to consider his response, careful to keep his face neutral. Although it was dark in the back of the car, he knew that it made no difference to the cat-headed Elder. She could easily see in the dark. “The Witch transferred all her knowledge and lore into the girl, Sophie, who we now know to be one of the twins of legend. The girl even admitted that she knew how to reverse the spell, but when Mars asked her—begged her—to do so, she refused. All I have to do is give her a good reason not to refuse the next time we ask.” Dee’s cruel lips twisted in a smile. “I can be very persuasive.”

The Dark Elder grunted.

“You don’t sound very happy about that. I would have
thought you would be thrilled to have someone like Mars back in your ranks.”

The Elder laughed, an ugly sound. “You know nothing about Mars Ultor, the Avenger, do you?”

The Magician took a moment before replying. “I know some of the myths,” he admitted.

“Once he was a hero; then he became a monster,” Bastet said slowly. “A force of nature, untamable, unpredictable and deadly beyond belief.”

“You don’t seem to like him very much.”

“Like him?” Bastet echoed. “I love him. And it is precisely because I love him that I do not want him abroad in the world again.”

Confused, Dee shook his head. “I would have thought we needed Mars in the coming battle.”